The world of work is changing at an unprecedented rate. The impact of this change on Victorian workers is immense, with an increasingly casualised workforce and growing focus on mental health and wellbeing. As the state’s workplace safety regulator, WorkSafe’s responsibility to ensure the safety of workers has never been more challenging.
In 2017 WorkSafe initiated a major transformation agenda. WorkSafe partnered with Today to set a vision for the future of their digital service and to re-design and re-platform the WorkSafe website.
WorkSafe needed a solution that supported them to adapt to new challenges and possibilities with ease, and also needed the processes that supported people from across their organisation to deliver it. It needed to be simple, practical and adaptable.
We defined a vision for the future of WorkSafe’s digital presence using stakeholder interviews, ethnographic research, journey mapping and rapid prototyping. We explored multiple possible concepts through the lens of feasibility, desirability and viability.
The previous digital experience was fragmented for users, with inconsistent and manual processes making it difficult to complete critical tasks. It was also fragmented for WorkSafe’s teams, increasing wastage and making it difficult to innovate—a critical capability for the organisation in a changing world.
It was clear that this was about more than a website—it was about innovation readiness. WorkSafe needed a solution that supported them to adapt to new challenges and possibilities with ease, and also needed the processes that supported people from across their organisation to deliver it. It needed to be simple, practical and adaptable.
Creating great digital services is not just a design and implementation process – we wanted to set WorkSafe up with the right approach and processes to support ongoing service delivery.
This meant establishing a human-centred, agile approach and a future-ready digital platform, ensuring WorkSafe can innovate appropriately and adapt to changing social and market forces into the future.
To serve WorkSafe’s diverse range of customers—experts, novices, health and safety practitioners, business owners and workers—we created a content personalisation strategy and a system of design components that can be recomposed at will for different customer segments. The site will intelligently reduce the number of steps required to answer a visitor’s question.
We led the design and delivery of the new website platform, leveraging a ‘headless’ content management system that supports multiple client web-applications and a modular front-end component library. This elegant technical architecture is unprecedented for a public sector website. By using and extending open-source tooling, we were able to deliver benefits for all of government, opening up channels for collaboration between agencies and departments.
The new WorkSafe website launched in July 2018. It’s a high profile expression of WorkSafe’s transformation from a traditional regulator to a community partner, offering active advice and training through a seamless and delightful experience.
Alongside the website, we authored and road-tested the tools and documentation that WorkSafe need to support and extend their platform.
The impact of this on the lives of Victorians will be felt over the next few years. It will help injured Victorians return to work faster, which in turn helps contribute to their recovery, and reduce the stress and anxiety of the claims process.
It will guide Victorian businesses to creating safer workspaces for their employees’ health and wellbeing. And it will enable WorkSafe to deliver an adaptive service for a changing world.